‘But after all, writing is nothing more than a guided dream,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges. Dreams and dreaming are fertile concerns for Rosalind Belben, too. Her fourth book, originally published in 1979 and reissued last year, was titled Dreaming of Dead People. It was followed, a decade later, by Is Beauty Good. Now available in a new edition from the Sheffield indie And Other Stories, this eccentric polyphonic novel contains dozens of considerations of dreams, including dogs’ dreams and horses’ dreams as well as human beings’. Yet what makes it extraordinary is Belben’s ability to capture in words the slippery state that is neither dreaming nor sleeping nor waking, but somewhere in the edgelands between all three.
“I fall awake and think, I want to go home. But there is no home.” So begins the chapter entitled Exile, a deliciously elusive story that is, most of the time at least, narrated in the first person by someone who is probably a woman, “a grizzled, cropped person”, and probably quite old and alone. They might be travelling through mountains somewhere, perhaps on a bus. They aren’t sure: “I am quite lost, wherever I am. I want to surrender. I wish to retire. I am tired.” Swishing about are uncertain memories of a childhood “shrouded” in nightmares: there was an orchard with an abundance of flora and fauna, and larks and swallows and “swifts to scream”. Like the author, the narrator was “born in the mud month” of February, and longs to disappear into marshlands to “be touched and stroked by plants”. But Belben never lets us rest in one place for long. Slipping in and out of sleep, “suffering glimpses”, the narrator stares at “a pink and blue angel” in the plaster of the wall. Which wall, you wonder, and how did we get here? This is the lure of Belben’s hypnagogia, the dizzying space into which she writes.
Divided into three sections – The Insatiable Wheel, Peacock Island, and The Great White Worm – Is Beauty Good comprises 30 vignettes, some just a single page, the longest running to nine. With intriguing titles including Peeing for Cynthia, Deaf Eggs, and Hands, each little chapter tells its own weird tale. Some loop into others with nods to earlier characters, narrators and locations, but what holds them together and thrusts the book forward are Belben’s obsessions with the loss of the natural world, with human folly and, as the title makes plain, with challenging the idea of beauty.
As other critics have noted, her work is undeniably strange. It won’t suit everyone. But for those of us who delight in the uncompromising quality of free jazz, Is Beauty Good is its literary equivalent. It is not simply that Belben defies convention by denying the certainty of interrogation in the book’s title, for example; or by excluding letters from some words some of the time – “you’re nevr up to much once you’ve been gassd” – or by taking more formal risks such as ending the chapter Raining Down Dung halfway through a sentence (“but chocolate and raspberry would put some iron into me, thanks very much, they spoon it into ancient folk who have no teeth and reckon”). What makes an encounter with her writing so exhilarating is its undiluted commitment to the author’s singular spirit.
Along the way, much is said about dying, deafness, desolation, depression, dogs, deckchairs and ducks, about horses, fish, frogs, swans, bees, “brackn”, brain cells, bad teeth, beetroot and bodily excretions, about elephants, litter, gardens, graters, colanders, streams, dreams and doubts. Excruciating commentary on the ordeal of being a woman – “how, she thought, do I get out of being a woman, it is repugnant” – surfaces again and again, often combined with slightly cruel humour.
In Daffodils, for example, the narrator ponders planting daffodils on the grave of someone he has poisoned. The victim cooked them up with potatoes and ate the dish with a friend, “the woman that wears purple cardigans, two at a time”. Belben has an aptitude for layering hilarious detail with harsh observation. “The old girl has woes,” she writes, “women tend to have woes and dwell on them, they bear grudges like apple blossom.” In the following paragraph, she doubles down on this train of thought: “Women have woes because men come along and by leaving daffodil bulbs in the vegetable rack dare them to be so stupid.”
Is Beauty Good does the opposite. It dares us not to be so stupid. It is less that Belben seeks deliberately to unsettle – I doubt she cares, to be honest – and more that she refuses to censor her imagination, her exacting fiction, in order to protect readers from her experience of life, in all its ugliness and all its glory.
